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2.1 Packaging Tutorial

GNU Guix stands out as the hackable package manager, mostly because it uses GNU Guile, a powerful high-level programming language, one of the Scheme dialects from the Lisp family.

Package definitions are also written in Scheme, which empowers Guix in some very unique ways, unlike most other package managers that use shell scripts or simple languages.

• Use functions, structures, macros and all of Scheme expressiveness for your package definitions.
• Inheritance makes it easy to customize a package by inheriting from it and modifying only what is needed.
• Batch processing: the whole package collection can be parsed, filtered and processed. Building a headless server with all graphical interfaces stripped out? It’s possible. Want to rebuild everything from source using specific compiler optimization flags? Pass the #:make-flags "..." argument to the list of packages. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think Gentoo USE flags here, but this goes even further: the changes don’t have to be thought out beforehand by the packager, they can be programmed by the user!

The following tutorial covers all the basics around package creation with Guix. It does not assume much knowledge of the Guix system nor of the Lisp language. The reader is only expected to be familiar with the command line and to have some basic programming knowledge.

• A “Hello World” package
• Setup
• Extended example
• Other build systems
• Programmable and automated package definition
• Getting help
• Conclusion
• References